Word: fourth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more than twelve years, as head of the ill-fated French People's Rally, and in his memoirs, General de Gaulle has made the institution of the Third and Fourth Republics responsible for France's political troubles. According to him, these institutions expressed all too faithfully the many divisions of French thought and interests. Hence the impotence of the Executive, which depended for survival on heterogenous, unstable coalitions, and which could do no more, on crucial issues such as Indochina, German rearmament or Algeria, than accumulate postponements until external events imposed their own solutions...
...what many critics of the Constitution declare, can hardly serve as a springboard for dictatorship. The emergency powers are described so minutely that they cannot really be used except in situations such as the fall of the Third Republic in June, 1940, or like the fall of the Fourth last May--circumstances in which a "national arbiter" might prove indispensable...
...will remain fragile, deprived of a firm basis in the electorate and more likely to find enemies than friends in Parliament. The wide gap between the political system, operating in an intellectual vacuum and an apathetic country has been one of the causes of the down-fall of the Fourth Republic. The present Constitution, by itself, does nothing to close this gap, except in so far as it provides for the possibility of occasional referendums...
...impossible to see how such a majority could be created in the near future. The men who ruled the Fourth Republic are likely to occupy the new structure too. They give little evidence of having reformed since last May. The party system is just as decrepit. New scissions have been added to the old splits. The only certainly that emerges from much talk about realignments is the appearance of new splinter groups...
...battle for and against the Constitution, confusion could hardly have been greater. Most of the men who overthrew the Fourth Republic advocated positive vote; they declared that it would show France's determination to keep Algeria French. However, Algeria is nowhere mentioned in the text, and General de Gaulle just said that the Moslems are Moslem--a rare example of politically meaningful tautology...